


I don’t really know a lot about love (But you’re in my head, you’re in my blood)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Coda, Developing Relationship, Fix-It, Getting Together, M/M, No Hurt all Comfort, h50 episode 10.19, in a way? they’re also kind of already together, these two and their long relationship and lack of clear communication make tagging complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-22 22:09:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23101162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “Remember-” Danny starts, and then changes his mind about standing there, because Steve is sitting in one of those wooden chairs he’s had since Danny’s known him, and Steve went through the trouble of dragging both of them back out here before settling down to be moody and quiet and watch another sunset, and Danny will take whatever he can get, at this point.Or: Steve and Danny have a talk about what’s been going on with Steve lately.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 66
Kudos: 339





	I don’t really know a lot about love (But you’re in my head, you’re in my blood)

**Author's Note:**

> I watched 10.19 late yesterday, and then I put my laptop away and went to bed, and then I accidentally spent at least two hours painstakingly typing 1400 words of fic on my phone, spread out over multiple notes in my notes app because I kept hitting the character limit. I guess this isn’t a fix for 10.19 as an episode per se, but rather for what some of the things that were said in that episode seem to imply about Steve and Danny’s future – if you’ve seen it, you probably know what I’m talking about. My current approach of dealing with that is getting in early and yelling dibs on the end, so that if canon gives me something I don’t appreciate, I can just tell it it’s too late and I already made my choice.
> 
> There are some very direct references to 4.19 and 8.06 in this, but if you haven’t seen or don’t remember those episodes it will still read just fine! The title is from the lyrics of About Love by MARINA.

Danny approaches from behind. Steve doesn’t look up, but he also doesn’t startle when Danny, still hidden from Steve’s view, speaks up. “You’re scaring me, you know that?”

That makes Steve turn his head, but it’s slow, a little tired-looking. Like everything about Steve recently. “Excuse me?”

Danny takes those final steps from the grass onto the tiny strip of beach that’s left after the last big storm. The sand is packed and wet enough that it doesn’t have much give, like the big touristy beaches where walking sometimes feels like trying to run in a dream. “Remember-” Danny starts, and then changes his mind about standing there, because Steve is sitting in one of those wooden chairs he’s had since Danny’s known him, and Steve went through the trouble of dragging both of them back out here before settling down to be moody and quiet and watch another sunset, and Danny will take whatever he can get, at this point. 

So he takes the chair, and more importantly, the gesture cleverly hidden behind it that says Steve hasn’t forgotten about him. It’s almost enough to make him feel so silly about coming out to complain to Steve that he puts the kibosh on the whole thing.

“Remember what?” Steve asks. 

That’s the crucial thing about almost: it’s just shy of enough. “That time you asked me why I hadn’t told you that I wasn’t sleeping because I was worried about your health.”

“I remember.” Steve stubbornly faces the ocean, like he’s not really interested in this conversation. “I’m also wondering why you’re suddenly bringing that up.”

Danny feels annoyance take hold, in spite of all of his good intentions coming into this talk. “You can’t seriously wonder that. I told you, when we were riding those horses - I told you I can hear you pace at night. How do you think I end up getting the opportunity to listen to you stampede around the house in the first place, huh?”

Finally, Steve’s jaw twitches, and he glances at Danny with something close to guilt. He would obviously never admit to it being that, but it is. “You’re not sleeping, too?”

“Yeah.” It’s a whole thing, opening up. Danny is great at yelling about every little feeling, but the big ones? The ones that make him feel vulnerable, that his instinct tells him to keep close to his chest in case someone laughs at them? That’s a very different, much more dangerous story. “So I’m telling you, now, because I care about you and I know it’s mutual: you’re scaring me. I’m scared, Steve, and I get that you’re going through something, but I want you to let me in.”

Steve scoffs. “Don’t you think you’re in enough? My house, my bed, my chair.” 

Danny breathes through the stab of betrayal. 

Before he can even open his mouth to respond and let the hurt out by lashing back, Steve lets his head sink into his hands, elbows on his knees, and rubs hard at his own forehead. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because I’m scared too.”

They’re sitting in warm evening light, but Danny feels the hair on his arms raise. Goosebumps. “Why?”

Steve lets his hands fall and turns his head just enough so that he can peer at Danny. He looks exhausted and old and sad. Danny’s chest aches and his throat tightens up.

“So it’s the radiation sickness?”

Steve sits up very suddenly. His half frown has dropped away, pushed out by what looks like open surprise. “What? No.”

“No?” Danny repeats. His chest hurts some more, but now because his heartbeat is picking up like crazy, hopeful but not sure they’re out of the woods yet.

“No,” Steve agrees. He sounds very firm about it. His general tiredness is still visible in the lines on his face, but as he shifts so he’s turned more towards Danny, it’s almost untraceable in his demeanor or slightly wide, slightly wild eyes. “My God, Danny, you’ve been thinking what, that I’m sick? That I’m dying and hiding it from you?”

Danny’s mind feels spinny with relief. He’d been so sure of it that he’d started working himself through the stages of grief all on his own, trying to prepare for the inevitable blow. “Your own health has historically never been your first priority,” he points out. “You’ve been tired and pale and sleepless and you love downplaying issues. What was I supposed to think?”

“I’m tired and pale because of the sleeplessness. I’m not- I’m not sick. Danny, I promise. You would know, so you could-” Steve waves a hand. “Do your thing. Try to get me to stop doing anything fun and force-feed me a secret soup recipe.”

“Good.” The weight that’s been lifted is unlike anything. “Thank you. For promising to keep me in the loop.”

“You’re my first call,” Steve swears. “Always.”

Danny allows himself to sit with that for a moment. The warm reassurance of it, the quiet steadiness. “So then why don’t I know what’s been happening with you? If it’s not your physical health, is it something mental?”

The direction of Steve’s body language changes again. Where he was open and willing Danny to trust him a moment ago, now he’s subtly turning away and pulling up some kind of shield again. He gives an awkward laugh. “You could say that.”

“What does that mean?”

Steve glances from the ocean to him and back to the ocean, squinting even though the sun has almost fully disappeared below the horizon by now and it’s just her last reflections keeping them from sitting in total darkness. “It’s not the PTSD,” he says. “Or anything like that. I’ve just been thinking.” He gives it a moment, and then adds, “A lot. About the future, and what I want it to look like.”

“Ah.” It makes enough sense to be believable, because those are not small subjects. Even less so for Steve, who’s never been great at accepting that he might have to give up his current lifestyle at some point. Danny settles in for some more of Steve’s classic denial strategy. “So did all that pacing get you anywhere?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, surprisingly. “I think I’m gonna quit dating. Already did, I guess.”

That takes Danny aback anyway, and it all abruptly stops making sense again. “What? Why?” He tries to go over their last talks about Steve’s love life, but none of them made him think something drastic like this was looming up ahead. Especially not if Steve’s physical health isn’t as in danger as Danny thought it was, because it eliminates that as an excuse. “I thought you were finally finding your groove, going out with two women in two weeks.”

“I was. I decided it’s not what I want.”

Danny watches the side of Steve’s impassive face with a sense of angry bafflement. Steve’s not usually the one out of the two of them to sabotage his own life in this particular way. “That’s stupid, but do go on. What do you want?”

A beat. Steve looks at him again. “The truth?”

“No, tell me a lie, please,” Danny bitches. “Yes, obviously, the truth.”

“I want you,” Steve says, and Danny maybe forgets to breathe for a moment. “To move in. Permanently.”

“You’re- Are you serious?”

Steve laughs, and for a moment Danny is poised to get way angrier than before, but then Steve says, “I’m too tired to joke about this.” He runs a hand over his hair, touches the back of his neck, rubs his jaw. Then he drops his hand and finally continues. “Do _you_ remember when you told me every time you get something good, you can’t stop thinking about when it’s going to end? I keep waking up in the middle of the night, scared the bed next to me will be empty. I go downstairs and pace because once, you woke up too and almost caught me staring at you. Danny, I’ve been very seriously considering going to your place with a crowbar and smashing things up so you can’t go back even when all the paint is dry and your furniture out of storage.”

The paint job could have been done five times over by now. The only reason all of the furniture isn’t back where it belongs yet is that he’s been putting it off. “I always knew you were a psychopath in the making,” is what Danny says, out loud.

“Danny.” Steve doesn’t roll his eyes, but he does look sad again, which is worse. 

Danny scrambles for something else to say, and finds there’s too much. He’s never had a shortage of words and they keep tumbling over themselves in his brain, like a plague of locusts descending on a field, eating away at his defenses until there’s nothing useful left. “Say I moved in,” he starts, which is already a capitulation. It’s one of those things he shouldn’t be thinking, certainly not out loud. “I give up my house, come live here for real, and keep sleeping in your bed because your couch is a health hazard and Junior is in the spare room. Do you realize what that would look like?”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Like I got what I wanted?”

“Like we’re shacking up. Like we finally gave in to all those jokes about how married we are and proved them right. That doesn’t scare you?”

Steve deliberately holds Danny’s eyes. He does it for long enough that there’s very little doubt left about whether it scares him – it does, it so does – but even less about whether he’s willing to take that leap. “What does it look like now, you think?”

He has a point. Danny’s not going to admit to it, because Steve already knows. Instead, Danny fumbles around in a suddenly wide open landscape for some kind of indication of what exactly Steve is getting at, in between all his dramatic declarations. “These, these things you want. Does that include, uh-”

“Anything, Danny,” Steve says, a weight of conviction behind it that can’t possibly come cheap. “Anything you’re willing to give.”

He looks at Steve. Really looks at him, head to toe. He breathes in and it’s kind of shivery. “Could be a lot.”

“I’m good with that,” Steve says, immediately. Danny would call bullshit on it because Steve hasn’t given himself any time to think, but for once, he obviously already did. A little too much, which is very novel.

And if Steve can still try new things, and if Danny can walk into Steve’s house and demand a welcome, who’s to say they can’t put those two together? “We’ll- We’ll have to rent a van. Move the stuff I don’t wanna trash or sell over here.” At least the things that aren’t already here, but that goes unspoken. They might not even need a van.

Steve nods. “I know some people.”

“Okay,” Danny says. It feels like this is a big deal and there should be a lot more to discuss, but there just isn’t. Apparently it’s less of a jump into the deep end than Danny would have thought, and in a way that makes sense, because he’s been standing at the shallow side waving at Steve and getting used to the temperature of the water the entire time. “Guess that’s settled then.”

“Guess so,” Steve agrees, utterly solemn until he suddenly, with no warning, starts grinning. It takes over his entire face. The wrinkles around his eyes get deeper in a way that shouldn’t be this flattering or reassuring, and Danny grins back, and he wonders if this is it and he’s finally gone mad. Might not be as bad as he’s always feared.

After a little while of that, he remembers the escape option he planned in case this talk blew up in his face. “We should, uh- We should really get inside and see how Junior fares with dinner.”

Steve’s relaxation is overwritten by surprised dismay. He looks almost comically betrayed. “You let him cook? Why would you do that?”

“I’m not the only one who’s been worried about you, you know.”

The surprise remains on Steve’s face, because even if some things change the man is still an idiot, but it’s more muted. “Well, he’ll have to find a way to work that out on his own. I’m not going to ask him to spend the rest of his life with me.”

“I would hope not,” Danny says, half joking, half serious. “Give a guy a moment to feel special before you smash all his hopes and dreams.”

Steve huffs a laugh. “All the moments I have left, Danny.”

It hits Danny like a ton of bricks, then: those moments, they haven’t been counted yet. They won’t be limitless, but there is nothing to suggest the end is in sight. He gets up, too much restless energy caught in his ribcage to stay sitting still. “Yeah,” he says, vaguely. “Hey, let’s go.”

Steve is already up, too, and he catches up with Danny with ease before Danny has even made his way from the star-lit sand onto the darker lawn. Steve doesn’t reach out as they head for the lanai and their house with its welcoming lights in the windows, but he walks so close their arms keep bumping, and that’s when Danny finally understands what that wild, barely contained feeling is. He is where he wants to be, with who he wants to be there with, and he is, of all things, happy.

Imagine that.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! ❤ If you liked this, consider leaving a comment, and remember not to make your best friend think you might be seriously ill when really you're just excessively worried about how much you love him.
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
